The work was commissioned by the Carnegie Hall Corporation for the pianist Garrick Ohlsson, to whom the piece is dedicated.
The title comes from a phrase in the Philip Roth novel American Pastoral, about which the composer wrote in the score program notes, "But unlike the Roth novel, which is largely elegiac and meditative, American Berserk is extroverted, punchy, and fundamentally good-natured.
Reviewing the world premiere, Anthony Tommasini of 'The New York Times described the piece as "the stylistic opposite of [Adams's] China Gates: jagged, relentless, harmonically spiky music with out-of-sync lines in block chords happening at once, like those crazy musical collages in Ives.
"[2] The piece has also been praised by Andrew Clements of The Guardian[3] and Peter Dickinson of Gramophone, who wrote:From an early age Adams was surrounded by popular music and jazz on equal terms with classical composers.
That background figures here with the crazier improvisational Ives and – very obviously – the swinging mechanical complexities of Conlon Nancarrow's studies for player piano.